by Stephen Hunt
Commodore Black deflected his sister’s thrust with an angry scraping of rasping metal. ‘Our age has passed. The trail of our comet has faded into the night, lass. We’re the last of them. All that is brilliant has waned and it’s time for us to go too.’
‘Never!’ yelled Gemma, drawing back, panting. ‘It is my right to rule and I shall!’ She feinted left, then thrust to the right, the commodore only just parrying her blow in time. Jared was getting tired, his arm as heavy as if his flesh was formed from concrete. She was younger than him, and her muscles not addled with a wicked black rot eating her body away from within.
‘You wouldn’t be ruling, Gemma. You’d just be warming a hard lifeless slab of stone cut to resemble a throne. We only ever ruled with the people, not over them. When our ancestors forgot that, we lost all the rights we ever had.’
‘You lying, cowardly, useless jigger,’ Gemma sneered, the sabre raised over her head and turning in her hand. Jared would take his eyes off that hypnotic windmill of hers at his peril. ‘How dare you stand there and spout base parliamentary propaganda at me. You betrayed our family, our line, the bloody cause. You left me to shoulder the legacy that should have been yours. All the times you ran away and here you are, choosing to stand for this? After all these years, have you found something you’d die for at last?’
‘I’m already dead, lass.’
Her sabre lashed out, nearly skewering his forehead as he stepped aside. ‘On that much, we agree.’
‘I promised our father that I would look after you, Gemma.’
‘A promise broken along with the fleet-in-exile,’ spat his sister.
He stumbled back as Gemma Dark showed him how fit she still was, her blade dancing from side to side, shifting with a fierce energy. Hate could do that, so it could. All their years together. Did she still remember the first lesson their mortal fencing master had taught them? A brief one, words only, rather than the long tiring drills that followed, high outside, low inside, thrust, parry, administered in the cramped confines of their u-boat and the royalists’ clandestine underwater harbour?
The art of combat is the art of the unexpected.
She thrust out towards his heart even as he dropped his guard, stepping sharply forward and to the side, taking the steel in the centre of his bandaged wounds. There was a brief glimmer of shock in her eyes as the realization dawned that she had trapped her blade in her brother’s body, skewering him. Then the terrible widening of her eyes as she felt her brother’s blade sinking through her body and emerging through her spine. She tried to speak, to curse and swear, but a throttled line of blood was all that emerged as she stumbled down towards the floor of the demon city, her brother clutching her tight.
‘My vow is true. I’ve saved you, Gemma. Our family was never meant to rule over these bitter ashes.’
Gemma tried to splutter her rage at him as they fell back on the oily deck. He whispered in her ear. ‘I’m a dead man walking, lass. Dying slowly, painfully, as my blasted body eats itself from the inside courtesy of the dark rot. I’ll be seeing you soon.’
She gurgled something, a last half-satisfied exhaling of breath.
Bellowing in pain, the commodore pulled himself off her sabre and pushed himself shaking to his feet. ‘That’s my luck, Gemma. Still alive for a little bit longer.’
The words came out as strangled sobs. He withdrew his blade from his sister’s body, wiping the steel on his trousers, then stumbled down the corridor following Charlotte Shade’s parting directions.
At the end of the passage a door had been opened into a long oblong-shaped chamber, Charlotte Shades and Sadly standing over an evil-looking control panel set beneath a wide screen staring out onto the deeps of the dark. The waters at the bottom of the trench were pitch black, but there was an arc of light so bright he could hardly stand to look at it. The illumination was coming from the vast crystal portal, the gate that could connect their world to the sea-bishop’s terrible homeland.
‘What are you doing?’ moaned the commodore as he lurched into the chamber. ‘Is that not the gateway to these demons’ spoiled world, thick with their hateful legions?’
Charlotte tapped the Eye of Fate, glowing now around her neck, filling the dim chamber with a light as terrible as the one outside the city. ‘The Court of the Air took a copy of the key from the sceptre. Originally they were hoping to corrupt the key and reintroduce it to the sceptre. Instead, we copied its imprint onto the Eye of Fate.’
The commodore pointed to the glowing portal outside. ‘You’ve activated their dark portal, lass. Are you mad?’
Sadly winked at him. ‘Not just activated it, but signalled the beasts that here is a world safe for them to feed on. They’re on their way to the feast.’
Commodore Black raised his sabre at them. ‘You’re bloody mesmerized! The demons’ve nobbled the pair of you.’ As he spoke the seed-city shifted and quaked beneath his boots, the weak u-boat man’s stance on the deck nearly unbalanced.
‘There’s an armada of seed-cities hurtling towards us down their tunnel,’ said Charlotte. ‘It seems only fair to send them one back.’
Sadly grinned as he worked the controls. ‘You know what happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force, you old rascal? A ruddy big explosion, the kind you can’t even measure on the chuffing scale!’
‘I need to stay here with the Eye of Fate,’ said Charlotte. ‘To pilot the city in and seal the portal at our end just before the impact. Otherwise our world will share the force of the explosion along with the sea-bishop’s home. You two get back to the docking bay and bail out on a darkship.’
‘I’m not leaving you alone here alone, lass.’
‘Do it!’ ordered Charlotte. ‘The Isla Furia will probably have fallen by now, the Court exterminated along with Jethro. Dick Tull is likely dead too. Someone needs to make sure these bloody vampires’ last survivors don’t rule the Kingdom and the Advocacy for the new few centuries. Expose them, root them out.’
The commodore put a hand on Charlotte’s shoulder. ‘You’re as plucky as my daughter ever was, lass. Goodbye to you, and as fair a wind in your sails as I never had.’
‘Go! You too, Sadly. I’m going to use the Eye to seal this chamber off for good.’
Commodore Black smashed the back of the girl’s head with the buckler of his sabre, catching her as she tumbled back, pulling off the Eye of Fate and slipping its chain over his head.
‘I wondered if it was going to be you or I to do that,’ said Sadly.
‘Ah, Barnabas, the Court trained you for the job,’ said the commodore. ‘But I was born for it. And now I’m dying for it, too, curse my unlucky stars.’
Sadly picked up Charlotte’s unconscious form and slung her over his shoulder, holding his hand out for the commodore’s sword.
‘Get your own steel, lad. You’ll find one by my sister just down the way.’
Sadly nodded. ‘You would have made a good agent for the Court.’
‘I’m a heartless jigger, lad, but I was never that evil a brute. Keep her alive or I’ll come back and bloody haunt you.’
He listened to the agent’s sprinting footsteps fading down the corridor and touched the glassy surface of the Eye of Fate. I always knew you would be the one to get me killed.
‘How else is a royalist to die?’ Elizica’s voice echoed in the commodore’s mind. ‘But in the service of a queen?’ The chamber door sealed as if it had never existed while the meaning of the controls flashed through his mind. ‘Don’t wait too long, Jared Black. I can sense alarms activating throughout the city. They know someone is inside their pilot’s chamber and that their portal has opened.’
I think it would be good if someone lived to tell of this, my bloody royal sovereigness.
‘The world must live, Jared Black. Our two friends understand this too.’
Jared worked the controls, the seed-city shifting from side to side as it dragged away from the bottom of the trench, a mist of dark silt spewing
up around them. The commodore counted the time down in his mind, ignoring the blood leaking from his shoulder, ignoring the angry burning in his lungs. His body afire with the pain of his illness and the strange connection to the Eye of Fate. Had Sadly made it? The agent’d used up his time and so, curse his stars, had poor old Blacky.
There was a terrible shaking as the seed-city passed through the crystalline arch, the pit of Jared’s gut falling away as they smoothly entered a realm of fractional unreality, mere probabilities between the infinite chain of worlds. Through the Eye of Fate he felt the throb of the shield generators activating, protecting them from non-existence in this queer realm beyond matter and reality. Sealing them in a bubble of time impervious to the raging non-existence outside. Jared Black felt something else too. The presence of Walsingham beyond the door, raging at the other sea-bishops outside to bring up equipment capable of cutting their way through the seed-city’s self-repairing structure. The sea-bishop’s face appeared floating above a projection panel on the commodore’s console, its hideous real face, not the stolen human features of a long dead State Protection Board officer.
‘Do not do this thing — pilot us back to your plane of existence. I will offer you the same deal I had with your sister. You shall be sovereign of your people, the new king of Jackals, ruling supreme and absolute. Your nation will be favoured among the entire world, master of all the others. Your enemies will bow down before you.’
‘Lead bull on the farm, eh? Siring lots of fat juicy cows for the plate.’ The pain in his shoulder was vanishing, burnt out by his unearthly connection with the Eye of Fate.
‘You shall be king!’ roared the creature.
‘I had a strange dream the last night I spent with the nomads of the sea,’ said the commodore. ‘I was on a station platform in the centre of town, waiting for a capsule with all the clackers and clerks to take me home, when I saw my father. He’s been dead for years, of course. Which is why I was so pleased to see him. We talked for hours about all the things we’d been doing, catching up, his life and mine. Ah, it was good to see him again, after all this time.’
‘What are you prattling about, animal?’ bellowed the sea-bishop. ‘Turn us around. Take us back through the portal!’
‘What am I talking about, you wobble-headed, blood-drinking, black-hearted bastard? It’s time for me to move along the Circle. But here’s the thing… you pack of jiggers are going first!’
Slamming his hand on the controls, the commodore sealed the portal behind him and killed the engines, their seed-city hurtling towards a hundred thousand identical cities closing in on them down a narrow thread of probability that shouldn’t exist. And then, in a searing noiseless explosion beyond even the power of the sun’s last gasp, it didn’t.
EPILOGUE
Lord Donaldson warmed his hands in the pockets of his overcoat as he waited for the door of the luxurious shopfront to be opened. His coat contained little rubber capillaries that circulated hot water from a heating stone secreted in its false lining, a fact for which he was grateful as the winter wind bit against his young six-foot frame.
‘Is this really necessary?’ he asked his manservant, Fisher.
‘Do you mean the procurement of a gem for your engagement ring, sir?’ said Fisher. ‘I rather think Lady Amanda will be expecting one.’
‘I mean all this,’ said his lordship, pointing to the transaction-engine drum turning in its armoured lock, processing their calling card with a rumble of suspicious clicks and clacks. No doubt cross-referencing their bona fides with the shop’s appointment book. ‘All this blasted security? Isn’t it more normal to go direct to a jeweller and leave the sourcing of one’s gem to the tradesman?’
‘Indeed, sir, indeed. Unfortunately, Lady Amanda has been very specific with her requirements. And this boutique doesn’t deal directly with jewellers. Those of quality who wish to buy must present themselves in person. It is something of an exclusive establishment.’
Their calling card accepted, the armoured portal began to vibrate as very large bolts began to slide back automatically.
‘I’m afraid the nature of the prices will serve to underline the nature of this exclusivity,’ explained the manservant. ‘And I should warn you, the proprietor is somewhat prickly. She threw out the Baroness Peery last week over some misunderstanding. A very slight matter indeed. I heard it from her chauffeur.’
‘How droll. I can see why Lady Amanda is attracted to such a place.’ Lord Donaldson sounded bored. But then, wasn’t this what having obscene amounts of family money was meant for? Smoothing out all such tiresome obstructions to his whims and humours?
Passing through the vaulted corridor, grilles and doors retracted, the pair entered a large airy sales room of polished black marble floors and solid oak display cases arranged so the glass tops caught the light from high above. Fisher nodded to staff dressed as footmen, standing sentry-still by a rectangle of Doric columns towards the room’s centre. Guards, obviously, but not dressed as such, lest the fairer sex be put into a faint by their intimidating presence. The contents of the row of cases did not shame the opulence of their surroundings — colours and shapes and cuts quite unlike anything to be glimpsed in the dozens of jewellers lining the fashionable street beyond.
‘This,’ Fisher announced, ‘is my Lord Donaldson.’
Lord Donaldson noticed a cloaked female figure emerging from behind one of the columns. ‘A rare collection, damson. We should start with your most precious gem first, so her ladyship may feel this afternoon’s work not better done with her presence, which would, I believe, be unlucky.’
‘If you place stock in such things,’ said the proprietor. ‘I am afraid my most precious gem was lost some time ago. But I am sure I have many here that will suit.’
Lord Donaldson peered in closer at the case. Some of the gems actually seemed to have been whittled as though they were ivory in a bored sailor’s hands. Tiny crabs the size of fingernails, formed as effortlessly as they had been poured from liquid diamond. ‘I must admit, I have never seen their like before. May I inquire as to their provenance?’
‘The seanore,’ said the proprietor. ‘The nomads of the underwater world.’
Lord Donaldson licked his lips appreciatively. ‘Incredible. I understood those devils would skin an air breather as soon as look at them?’
‘They do try, every now and then,’ said the proprietor, removing a tray of intricately shaped gems from under glass. ‘But a few of them hold me with a little more fondness than is usual between surface dwellers and the underwater clans. From what Mister Fisher has told me of your fiancee, something from this collection might suit?’
Lord Donaldson had to stop himself from wincing when Fisher discreetly slipped him the price list, with her ladyship’s preferences circled in appropriately red ink. Yes, he could see why Lady Amanda liked this place. His eyes settled on the establishment’s name engraved in gold leaf on the marble wall. One word, resonant of all the compressed exclusivity and mystique that surrounded this shop: Shades.
The female proprietor lightly brushed the velvet cushion holding the gems, then winked at him. ‘Don’t worry, your lordship, for a piece that will grace the hand of the fair lady who is to unite the third and fourth greatest families in the Kingdom, why, it’s a steal.’
Lord Donaldson sighed. To let his manservant lure him into this palace of licensed larceny… someone must have hypnotized him into coming along in person.
Jethro Daunt pushed his way through the dense bush as quietly as he could, disturbing the man-sized leaves far less than he was provoking the plagues of biting insects rising out of the dripping green foliage. There seemed a man’s weight of bugs waiting with every step the ex-parson took across the Concorzian colonies. Not that Boxiron was bothered. The black buzzing things could crawl across his shining steel chest without a twinge of visible discomfort from the steamman.
Climbing far faster — and stealthier — than Jethro could, Boxiron had already g
ained the rise. He was lying down examining the vista below with only the gentle clicking of his vision plate to indicate he was counting the spears and dart-guns ranged against the pair of them.
‘It would seem the aborigine you bribed is reliable,’ said Boxiron.
‘Quite so,’ said Jethro, unclipping the telescope from his belt and extending it out for a better look. If the informer had been untrustworthy, then their friends wouldn’t be in the clearing at the bottom of the hill, staked out against wooden posts. Daunt adjusted the telescope’s magnification. Yes, there was Molly, Coppertracks and Professor Harsh, all tied up along with the survivors among their guides. The aborigines — man-sized grasshopper things — were dancing around their prisoners, lashing their own bodies in acts of self-flagellation. Music was echoing out of the ruined city behind the Jackelians, eerie piercing notes that put Daunt in mind of sawing wood. The beat’s tempo was accelerating, no doubt quickening right up to the point when the piled wood under their friend’s feet would be torched and the feasting begin.
‘There are a lot of warriors down there, old steamer.’
‘They will not present a problem,’ said Boxiron.
No, they probably wouldn’t, even if Boxiron had been alone. Daunt could barely discern the little movements along the line of jungle that indicated Boxiron’s drones were slowly moving into position. And Daunt knew what to look for. For the aborigines, Boxiron would most likely be the first steamman they were going to see. The last too, unfortunately for many of them.
‘Ready yourself, Jethro softbody. I fight in five.’
‘I remain quite certain your upgraded body can shift its gears without my intervention.’
Boxiron said nothing. It was as though he still needed permission to be unleashed, and perhaps that was just as well. Making such judgements should remain the job of a priest, not a knight’s, even if the two of them were no longer quite the people they had once been. Daunt still had a yen for mischief and justice, and Boxiron still had a taste for mayhem. Daunt grabbed the gearstick on Boxiron’s back, and very quickly, both their tastes were fully obliged.
